The 25th Meeting-versary, Part I: Hydra
The Jeff Koons “Apollo Windspinner” that looms over the long walk from Hydra town to Mandraki Beach.
“It is with My Ántonia, so consecrated to memory, that Cather arrives at her deepest theme. She would have understood T. S. Eliot’s remark that we live not just in the present but in the present moment of the past, past and present being the warp and weft of all experience. The lively hoard of contingent occurrences that add up to a life is infinitely to be cherished.”
—Benjamin Taylor from Chasing Bright Medusas, the new Willa Cather biography out in November and being celebrated at Gotham 11/18/23
”Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove/Dance me to the end of love”
—Leonard Cohen (inhabitant of Hydra from 1906-1967)
I was 18 when I met Bret in Greece in 1998, which incredibly makes this trip our 25th meetingversary. I documented our 20th with the children five years ago. The interval and our sense memories highlight how different life and travel feel with children at 13/8 versus 8/3, although we are as many years (and a pandemic) worse for the wear. Maybe we’re a little wiser, too.
If that trip was a great deal about nostalgia (we had not been back to Greece since 2002), it’s allowing this one to be about our family’s shared present and building on the children’s own memories. William, who is re-reading the whole of Rick Riordan, had a short list of requests: Olympia, a return to Hydra, and the Temple of Poseidon outside Athens—along with a lot of gyros. For Cordelia it’s a bit different. Her “memories” are based on photos and our reminiscences; we can’t know if at age three she might have formed some indelible impressions of our beloved “host dog” Cleo in Santorini or the orange juice that seemed to be William’s main motivation for going back to Hydra. The big draw for her—and a relief for all of us—is her knowing how to swim this time around!
As for Bret’s and my wish list? I think we shared the children’s deeper need for undiluted family time and a not-too-adventurous adventure someplace far but dear. We had succeeded at tearing Bret, who’d long been working seven-day weeks, away from Gotham, and we desperately needed to pause—together—before the frenzy of the fall/holidays that are nigh.
In the wake of our three-year marathon (which included one actual marathon!) around buying and re-opening Gotham, I kept the itinerary simple with room to pare it further down. (I even decided not to bother with our beloved Spetses, the birthplace of our story.) After an all-night flight, a mountainous three-hour drive from Athens to a car park in Metoxi on the Peloponnese, a wild sea taxi ride to our neighborhood on Hydra, and a dually blistering uphill walk with a SteamLine and backpack apiece, a massive tennis bag, and three “mom bags,” we were already ripe to trim the fat from our schedule. Although a breeze compared to last time with a three-year-old (which meant stroller or shoulders the better part of the trip), travel—related to the French word travail—is always work. We located our Airbnb dripping and barking as Bret’s phone began buzzing from the States.
I had initially planned two nights in Hydra followed by the last performance of Oedipus Rex at Epidavros en route to Costa Navarino, our home base next to the new Mouratoglou Tennis Center. I had dreamed of watching the children’s faces register the 17,000-seat ancient amphitheatre that Bret and I visited in 1998. But the curtain time wasn’t till 9pm, the drive sure to be headspinning and, after collapsing in our better-than-hoped Airbnb with its dream view of the sea, it didn’t take long to give Rex the axe and extend to a third night in Hydra.
Moments after arrival in Hydra circa 7pm Thursday 8/24 after heading to the airport from Harlem about 5pm the night before—a less than 20-hour journey door-to-door!
The extension turned out to be one of those fortuitous travel pivots I love. It gave us the space to discover additional beaches and, most importantly, accept friendship when it was offered to us. Our neighbors, an impossibly cheerful pair from Athens who owned the building, also had an eight-year-old daughter, Aliki. The girls’ instant kinship bridged and bonded us all. And because we had extended, we were not too oppressed by other notions for our time to gladly accept their dinner invitation the second night. Over a conversation along with another lovely couple—old friends of theirs who also live in Athens and summer in Hydra—we experienced homophrosyne, that Homeric word meaning like-mindedness. We learned much about urban Greeks today and were invited to be shown around Athens when we end the trip there. With their eldest son in Brooklyn, we’ll even get to host them at Gotham upon his graduation next May!
In five years the cat-and-donkey filled island had changed little with its tiny bustling port that both times we’ve visited briefly but avoided in the main. (We spend enough time on another pretty busy island). Our neighborhood of Kamini, a mere ten-minute walk from the resources of town, is also an easy five-minute walk from a perfect beach with another wonderful option fifteen minutes further. The tranquil waters at both are ideal for snorkeling and keeping a mom (almost) worry-free. On the last day we repeated our hour-long walk to Mandraki beach, past the new Jeff Koons, with much less whining from the kids thanks to much longer legs!
The main change in the neighborhood was the addition of a little playground I would have killed for when Cordelia was three. I thought it would be wasted on us at this stage but was delighted to be wrong. Between that and newborn kittens who lived at the main tavern—both all but next door to our home—Cordelia got to feel the first thrills of independent exploration, while William still loves swinging (too high for me!), showed off pull-ups on the swingset bar, and fell in love with the kittens too.
As for my independent exploration? While Bret napped off New York, I treated myself to daily peripatos—thought-wanders on which I do what makes me happiest when traveling, minor events like stocking up at the pharmacy or getting a trim, eeking out Greek on errands that let me imagine for a moment I live somewhere new. On these walks I can see in ways not possible when in company. My greatest sight: a very very old woman carrying milk and a few provisions, presumably her daily haul, who side-stepped barelegged through brutal-looking brambles, straight up the side of a steep incline to save a few roundabout steps. In the still-newsworthy Greek August heat, she looked cool as could be. A human extension of the landscape, shaped and strengthened by her home.
Over the years I’ve learned that the journey of travel, a tidy microcosm for that of life, is about loss, setbacks, and recovery as much as ecstatic discovery. The loss of illusions, tempers, things, the adjustment of expectations and remaking of plans. As we discover new places, rediscover ourselves, rekindle love, we are on an internal odyssey that includes healing from or replacing that which cannot be reclaimed. If Elizabeth Bishop best expressed “the art of losing” and Joni Mitchell the quotidian cycle of losses and gains, then nothing I’ve learned better expresses our human relationship to loss than the Greek Orthodox Saint Phanourios who "has become famous for assisting the faithful in revealing lost or hidden spiritual matters of the heart, objects, directing or revealing actions that should be taken, restoring health and similar situations.”
Naturally I had never heard of this saint when we were invited to attend a ceremony with our new friends our third and last night in Hydra. The pilgrimage to the hilltop church would process by our Airbnb, and we would be welcome to join. Dressed for church, the next day we fell into step bearing prepared reflections on loss and the plans to pray in our way for recovery of one sort or another.
At the ceremony outside a miniscule church atop one of Hydra’s comedically steep footpaths, the audience was a study in the contrasts of time, place, and class. Native Hydrans, piety carved in their faces, were mixed with “modern” Greeks—maybe part of the summer crowd like our friends—whose faces registered solemnity as they mouthed the right words. There were a few fish out of water like us. The priest, who was singing scripture when we got there and going strong an hour later, blessed the traditional offerings of bread while the faithful came forth with their candles, ready to make their prayers. I was deeply moved by what struck me as a glimpse of the last of a fraying tie to the ancient past.
We left Hydra with full hearts and the hope of finding our new friends again in Athens, as well as the immediate hope of finding our rental car intact after three days at the Metoxi car park! The sea taxi back to the dock was harrowing for me (and only me) yet again, but the driver picked up on my nerves and invited me to drive. He said I would “feel less fear,” telling me his mother is the same way about cars. I guess I do like the driver’s seat.
Rental car in one piece, we hit the road for the Ionian Sea with a planned stop in Nafplio for lunch. A brief taste of the past, having been there in 1998 and 2018. What would this trip be without a little nostalgia? Then it was on to the all-new world of Messinia and Mouratoglou. Stay tuned for our report from there!
